A baseball card hobby blog…

Lou Boudreau

This will be a quick little update here as I’m currently watching Game 1 of the 2016 World Series.

What a season it has been as we finally arrive here at Game 1 with the Chicago Cubs and the Cleveland Indians facing off. It’s certainly great to see two teams with such dedicated…and patient fans.

Who am I rooting for? I’m excited for both teams but at the end of the day, I think I’ll have to go with the Chicago Cubs. Their fans have waited longer and I’m a huge fan of their catcher David Ross. What a career he has had. He is hanging up his cleats after this year and getting to put a World Series ring on his finger would be the perfect send off.

This past weekend I was looking through a collection of Perez-Steele Hall of Fame postcards that I have accumulated through the years and came across Mr. Lou Boudreau. Ironically, he was the player/manager of the last Cleveland Indians team to win the World Series. Boudreau managed the Tribe from 1942 to 1950 and lead the team to a World Series title in 1948. As their shortstop that year, he also hit .355. Seems fitting to write about him tonight. I love his signature on this post card. Simple and legible – something you don’t see in today’s players signatures.

A few interesting facts about Boudreau – 1941 against the New York Yankees, he was responsible for starting the double play that ended Joe DiMaggio’s historic 56 game hitting streak.

In 1942 during his rookie year as Cleveland’s player/manager, Boudreau is said to have not only blown his nose while suffering from a cold in the dugout, but also the game. Not feeling well enough to play the field that day, he decided to sit in the dugout and send signals to his third base coach. At the time, Cleveland’s sign for a double-steal was a towel to the face.

Boudreau seemed to have forgotten that sign as Cleveland runner Pat Seerey pulled up into second base. Seerey’s nickname was “Fat Pat” and it doesn’t take a genius to conclude that ol’ Fat Pat wasn’t stealing any bases anytime soon. First base was occupied by a Cleveland runner who was just as slow.

As you can probably imagine, Boudreau’s cold that day led him to reach for the nearest towel to blow his nose. This set off a verrrrry slooooow domino effect of two very overweight base runners taking off from their bases and attempting to advance.

While the stadium stood in shock to watch the opposing infielders easily toss out both of Boudreau’s fat base-runners for an inning-ending double play, Boudreau lept to his feet barking at the third base coach for putting on such a stupid play. The third base coach was just as stunned as the fans, the 2 base runners, and the opposing team. He told Boudreau that it was in fact HIM who had given the sign for such a stupid play and it was then that Boudreau realized that he had “blown it”. The Indians went on to lose that game.

Boudreau is also widely credited with creating the “Boudreau Shift” with the

hopes of stopping the dead-pull hitter Ted Williams. In July of 1946 as Williams was coming off of a May where he had hit .427 and the Red Sox were coming into Cleveland for a double-header with a five-game winning streak. In the first game, Williams smashed a grand slam in the third inning and followed that up with two more dingers. By the end of the first game, Williams had racked up four hits, four runs scored, and eight RBI’s. The Red Sox went on to win the first game 11-10. In his first at-bat of the second game, Williams would double and score.

Boudreau had to do something defensively drastic. Moving nearly every defensive player to flood the right side of the field, Boudreau hoped that the carnage would stop. In his next at bat, Williams grounded out to Boudreu who was while still playing shortstop was actually standing closer to the first baseman. The Red Sox would go on to win the second game as well with a final score of 6-4. Later, in his biography Player-Manager, Boudreau would go on to say that the idea of the shift was spontaneous and was probably out of desperation that day. The infield shift has been already been covered pretty extensively online. One of the best articles can be found here.